New Lyric Essay in Poetry Northwest Online!

Now that I’ve found a home for throughsmoke: an essay in notes, I’ve begun work on a new series of essays. This project, tentatively titled Exhibition, a Self-Portrait, focuses on what it was like to grow up in a home with a very fine art collection. If throughsmoke gave me an opportunity to experiment with flash nonfiction, then Exhibition is pushing me to see how long I can sustain an essay. As a poet, I tend toward compressed narrative. So, figuring out how to expand an idea beyond an initial impulse or image is an exercise I find both engaging and challenging.

When I was working on throughsmoke, I never submitted any of the individual “notes” to journals for consideration. They just seemed too small, too odd to work independently of the others. But the essays in Exhibition do stand on their own, and so I’ve begun to send them out. The first of these pieces, “Autoportret,” appears in the online issue of Poetry Northwest. You can read the essay here.